Innovation in College Media

WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

One of the inspirations for starting this project was the ambitious plans Duke University has for overhauling Central Campus. Officially, Duke has proposed creating a new student media center on this new campus, which could be home to The Chronicle, and as well as the student TV station (Cable13) and radio station (WXDU) and others.

The Chronicle, as an independent organization, needs to decide whether it wants to be part of the new Central Campus, or whether to push for a new home elsewhere. We'll be looking at the question of location and what role it plays in the newsroom of the future. But in general, we're agnostic about whether the newsroom we propose gets built on Central or somewhere else. Hopefully, our research over the next year will guide us toward making a recommendation, and that could well be that Central is the best spot.

In any case, because Central Campus looms large at Duke and for this project, I'll be providing regular updates on the progress of the campus planning. Here, then, is a story that appeared the Herald-Sun of Durham on July 17, nothing that Duke has selected a new architect (registration required), something that sounds exciting, but will also delay the project's groundbreaking for at least a year. That's fine with us, because it gives us more breathing room to pursue this project and get a proposal in the hands of Duke officials next May:

Duke University has hired one of the world's top architects to take a fresh look at the design for its Central Campus redevelopment and spell out exactly how the project should unfold over the next 50 years.

Campus leaders announced the choice of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects on Tuesday. The firm's founder, Cesar Pelli, will lead the project team personally and said he expects to deliver a tentative master plan for Central Campus to Duke's Board of Trustees in February.

Pelli, who's 80, is renowned as the designer of Malaysia's Petronas Towers and a host of other noteworthy projects in cities throughout the world. His firm's credits include campus plans for the University of Texas at Austin and Rice University, and two brand-new campuses in Argentina, Pelli's native country.

But:

Provost Peter Lange and other Duke officials are equally happy about bringing Pelli on board, although they concede the upcoming design work will delay the start of construction on Central Campus by about a year, until at least late 2008.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

I finally got around to registering for Second Life. Which means, of course, that I created my avatar: Roan Oh. There's some significance to the first name, which I may share later. But for now, here he/I is/am:

Sunday, July 15, 2007

There are so many things a journalist has to be that just weren't on the radar when I graduated and got my first full-time newspaper job in 1992. Here's a couple more to add to the list: innovator and entrepreneur.

This struck me last week as I was reading the Newspaper Next report that came out in August 2006. The study was commissioned by the American Press Institute to figure out ways that newspapers can reinvent their business and content to survive and prosper in this turbulent era. No matter whether you agree with it, it ought to be required reading for anyone working at a newspaper these days.

I downloaded it because the paper where I work full-time, is about to embark on a process of "blowing up" the entire paper in the wake of our latest layoffs. Over the next three or four months, we'll be re-examining and re-imagining every part of our business using the Newspaper Next process.

I have some criticisms of the NN outlook. But on the whole, I think it provides some important, and hopeful thinking. What I particularly liked were a couple things.

First, it reminds me that the reasons people used to read newspapers went beyond just the news that people like me wrote about. They came for a variety of reasons, from reading the comics, to getting the school lunch menu, to finding out about events in their community, and to buy and sell things. We've lost our monopoly on all these things, not just news reporting. Overall, the newspaper was the thing that tied together and defined a community. News is just a part of this equation, though an important one obviously.

But second, as we try to rethink out business, the NN process tells us to figure out what "jobs" we can do for people, with the goal of finding new services to provide. I think there a lot of these, actually. And this makes me hopeful about the future of newspaper. Actually, it makes me incredibly excited. With all the technology available, and all the information on local communities sitting around newspapers, there are a lot of opportunities. It won't be easy, by any means, but it's possible.

But turning my eye back to this project, the Next Newsroom, it also makes me realize that preparing a college journalist for the future means instilling that instinct for innovation and entrepreneurship. They will constantly have to be reinventing themselves, and their industry. It won't be an option just to pound out a few stories and leave the rest to others. Everyone will have to be a part of the process, or it will stall and fail. And newspapers will place a high premium on people who can not only report, investigate, and tell stories, but also identify services and communities that a newspaper could serve.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

As we launch this project, one of the folks I'm eager to talk to is Juan Antonio Giner, founder of the INNOVATION Media Consulting Group. Giner and his folks have done a lot of consulting and thinking about the design of newsrooms going forward. He's been very critical of the new New York Times newsroom, which he considers too "boxy."

By contrast, here is a video of the new newsroom designed for the The Daily Telegraph in the U.K. They used a hub design which they think will lead to more natural collaboration, more integration, and more innovation.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Check out this video the NY Times has posted about its move to the new digs. It seems the staff, including the executive editor, have some odd feelings about it. "It's like a movie set." "It feels like everyone should be wearing Prada."

Among the other Knight grant winners this year, one that I'll be watching closely is the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship that's being created at Arizona State University. They're not building a new newsroom. But they are looking at some creative ways of getting student journalists to work with business, engineering, and design students. This will all be taking place in a brand new journalism building they've opened on a new campus in downtown Phoenix.

If there's anyone obsessed with the future and all things new, it's the folks at Fast Company. The business magazine just moved into a new office in New York. Yes, it's a magazine. And it's very unlikely that any college media are going to be moving into any large, glass skyscrapers in the near future.

Still, the interior design and layout can be seen on this slideshow posted on the Fast Company website. And it's worth noting how they describe the various design elements in terms of the values and goals of the magazine.

Monday, July 2, 2007

If there's a big stir in the world of newsrooms, it's the new newsroom that was built for The New York Times. I'll be talking more about this later, but for now, there was an elegy for the old newsroom written by Gay Talese for the New York Observer who attended a sort of moving out party at the abandoned newsroom.

Friday, June 29, 2007

One of the more daunting aspects of this project is the stipulation that we create our "Newsroom of the Future" in Second Life. I happened to be in Durham, N.C. having lunch with Gary Kebbel, the director of the Knight Challenge Grant program, when I first learned this was going to be a part of my life. Over sandwiches at Satisfactions, he mentioned that the Knight Foundation had added the Second Life requirement to our grant. I was just so giddy that we were getting the grant that I didn't say much about the Second Life thing.

I had heard the hype, but I hadn't really explored it myself, having neither the time or the inclination. But after that meeting, I began to check it out. And since then, I've alternated between anxiety and excitement over this element.

For instance, I figured this was a pure geek realm. So I was surprised to learn that so many corporations and non-profits were buying land in Second Life to develop projects. Count Duke among those that have set up an official "Duke" island in SL.

Still, I registered, created an avatar and went poking around. And that left me feeling even more daunted. After returning to Silicon Valley a couple weeks ago, I attended a presentation by two of the main engineers from Linden Labs, which developed SL. They did a demo which was completely stunning and inspiring. At the same time, when it came down to the actually making and building of a simple object, I left thinking that I could spen the whole next year doing nothing but managing our Second Life presence.

Even more interesting to me has been people's reactions when I tell them I'll be doing something in Second Life. I get everything from extreme eye rolling to awkward silences to ecstatic applause. Really. It's interesting how provocative just the very idea of SL has become.

The other issue is cost. Linden offers a discount to educational institutions and non profits. But still, to build something in SL, you have to own land. And the most direct way to get land is to buy an island. Even with the discount, it costs $800 for an island and $150 per month to maintain it. Since our grant is $40,000, it's not a trivial amount.

Fortunately, I had a great chat with Tim Bounds, the IT support guy for Student Affairs. He's in charge of developing Duke's SL island. They just bought the island this spring and haven't done much there yet. But Tim made a generous offer to donate a chunk of Duke's land to the project which will be great on several levels. It we want Duke students to come and interact in our virtual newsroom, it might as well be on Duke's island, right?

The next challenge is to find someone who wants to take charge of all this for us. Fortunately, I've had an offer from someone who is eager to get involved with the Next Newsroom project. And I also contacted the folks at Duke's Information Studies and Information Sciences department. They're developing their own presence in SL, and they teach several classes that deal with SL. In any case, they apparently have been looking at issues of new media and community, so I'm eager to talk to them about what we're doing.

I'll leave it there for now. But if anyone has an SL experiences they want to share, please post them here, or send them to me.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

As this project gets rolling, one of my challenges is to get acquainted with the various digital efforts going on at Duke, both at The Chronicle, but also throughout the campus. I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago, when I got this random email from the Duke alumni association:

If you want to keep up with what's happening at Duke, check out iTunes U, your electronic campus. Duke is now one of 16 universities whose content makes up the new iTunes U section of the iTunes store. You can find audio and video of major speakers, student-made movies, music, news, or a wealth of other topics.

I just got the video iPod for xMas and I've been a true convert, after years of being an Apple skeptic and clinging tightly to my antiquated portable CD player. In particular, it really got me much more tuned into the podcasting phenomenon. My 30GB player is regularly filled with audio and video podcasts. So I went to check out Duke's iTunes site, and it's pretty impressive. It seems that you don't really need to be at Duke anymore to experience life at Duke.

I'm sure I'll spend hours exploring a lot of these offerings. But there's a couple off the bat that caught my eye. Duke's iTunes page highlighted a video series called "Froshlife." I watched one of the videos based at Aycock dorm, one of the places I used to live. The videos are shot and directed by freshmen (first years?), and the quality is very good. I suspected that new students at Duke must have a high media literacy rate, and this certainly bolsters that idea.

The other item I checked out was Earthfiles.org, an audio news feature produced by the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. It reminded me that The Chronicle, or even student TV station Cable 13 or radio station WXDU don't have monopoly on news gathering and production on campus. Everyone is getting in on the act.

Still, I would love to see something that functions as a hub for this incredible breadth of activity. I wonder how many people on campus are generally aware of all these efforts? Or whether they're all taking place in isolation? If that's the case, there's certainly an opening for a newsroom or media center that could serve as a unifying force for all this media creation and participation.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

This is the start of the Next Newsroom blog. If you're looking for more information on the project, you can get some background at our temporary website: www.nextnewsroom.com. We expect the real site to go live later in July. And when it does, this blog will shift over there. But more on that later.

In the coming weeks, this will be a place where you can come for updates on our progress building the site and assembling our team, volunteers and game plan. I want our process to be as transparent as possible, so I'll be giving pretty frequent updates on all aspects of our work.

I'll also use this blog to discuss some of the things we're learning and thinking about. And I'll discuss various things that are being written on and talked about the subject of converged newsrooms. The pace of change in newsrooms is astonishing to me. I've been a professional journalist for 16 years (yikes!) now. People have been talking about this moment for years. But now it's here. Everything is changing. I'd been on a leave of absence from the Mercury News for the past year. And my first week back, I took two classes on how to shoot and edit video. Newspapers are shriveling, and they can't embrace multimedia and the web fast enough.

That's scary and exciting all at once. We have another round of layoffs next week. In the past five years, we will have lost half our newsroom (from 410 to 200 bodies). At the same time, the technologies, the equipment, and the cultural shift inside newsrooms have ironically made this potentially one of the most exciting moments in journalism history. We have a chance to reinvent a whole industry.

But it's also clear to me how the legacy newsrooms we use can inhibit that shift. They were designed, built, and populated for another era of journalism. In this new era, speed and collaboration are more vital. When and how people interact, their ability to access the right tools, can be cumbersome and more difficult that they should be. These are all topics I'll be exploring here, and of course, in the larger project.

Speaking of that project, we're working with two fabulous partners to put our site together. College Publisher, an MTV subsidiary, is the leading content manager for college newspaper sites. They're going to be building the framework and features using Drupal, the open source content management system. This is my introduction to Drupal, but I'm hearing amazing things about it.

On the design side, we're working with Leap Design, a Charlotte firm owned an operated by husband and wife team Bob and Laurie Smithwick. Laurie was a Chronicle person once upon a time.

This work will come together in the next few weeks, with the idea that it will be up in some fashion in late July. I'll be looking for lots of feedback as various elements go live.

And of course, this project might not be happening without the generosity of the Knight Foundation. We're honored to be a part of the first recipients of the Knight Challenge Grant program. I got a chance to meet many of the other winners during a conference in Miami, and they're an inspiring bunch. Definitely check out their projects.

In the meantime, I'm building a list of newsrooms and experts we ought to consider visiting or interviewing. So send any my way. And we'll be looking for any and all volunteers to take on a variety of tasks. So, speak up and we'll find a way to get you involved.

About Me

I'm a business columnst at The San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley. I'm also manager for The Next Newsroom Project. This blog is mostly about our family life with my wife Jen, son Liam, 6, and daughter Kalian, 4.